The article is terrible, this doesn't affect the default NAPI behaviour. See the LWN link posted elsewhere for a more detailed, technical discussion. From the p

The article is terrible, this doesn't affect the default NAPI behaviour. See the LWN link posted elsewhere for a more detailed, technical discussion. From the patch set itself: > If this [new] parameter is set to a non-zero value and a user application has enabled preferred busy poll on a busy poll context (via the EPIOCSPARAMS ioctl introduced in commit 18e2bf0edf4d ("eventpoll: Add epoll ioctl for epoll_params")), then application calls to epoll_wait for that context will cause device IRQs and softirq processing to be suspended as long as epoll_wait successfully retrieves data from the NAPI. Each time data is retrieved, the irq_suspend_timeout is deferred.